Arizona State University, like many colleges across the United States, has a problem with students who enter their freshman year ill prepared in math. Though the school offers remedial classes, one-third of students earn less than a C, a key predictor that they will leave before getting a degree. To improve the dismal situation, ASU turned to adaptive-learning software by Knewton, a prominent edtech company. The result: Pass rates zipped up from 64% to 75% between 2009 and 2011, and dropout rates were cut in half.

But imagine the underside to this seeming success story. What if the data collected by the software never disappeared and the fact that one had needed to take remedial classes became part of a student’s permanent record, accessible decades later? Consider if the technical system made predictions that tried to improve the school’s success rate not by pushing students to excel, but by pushing them out, in order to inflate the overall grade average of students who remained.

The maker of ClassDojo, a popular behavioral tracking app used in schools across the United States, announced revisions on Tuesday in the way it retains student information.

Starting in January, the company intends to keep students’ behavioral records for only one school year.

“We are not a data company. So we have no need to keep any data beyond allowing it to be communicated between teachers, parents and students,” Sam Chaudhary, the co-founder of ClassDojo, wrote in an email to a reporter. “We think one year will give busy parents an opportunity to find time to review this information.”

But some parents, teachers and privacy law scholars say ClassDojo, along with other unproven technologies that record sensitive information about students, is being adopted without sufficiently considering the ramifications for data privacy and fairness, like where and how the data might eventually be used.